Portable electronic products of various types are becoming increasingly popular. Many of these products use commercially available dry cell batteries which are discarded after a period of use during which the energy in such batteries is exhausted. The batteries then are replaced in order to permit continued ongoing use of the device in which they are placed. Obviously, this results in a continued expense for the purchase of the replacement batteries, as well as the inconvenience of removing the exhausted batteries and replacing them with new ones. In addition, the discarding of exhausted batteries and the continuing need to replace them with new batteries clearly is wasteful of natural resources.
Accordingly, rechargeable battery packs have been developed for use in place of discardable dry cell batteries in many portable electronic devices. Often, however, the external package configuration for a rechargeable battery pack which produces the same output power as the dry cell batteries is different from the space required for the dry cell batteries. Accordingly, a device often is made to accommodate one or the other, that is dry cell batteries or a rechargeable battery pack, but cannot accommodate both.
An alternative is to provide extra spacers or the like to enable the use of a smaller rechargeable battery pack in a battery storage compartment built to accommodate rows of dry cell batteries having an overall larger volume than the rechargeable battery pack. Another alternative is to build special shapes of rechargeable battery packs which have external dimensions approximating the overall external dimensions of the several dry cell batteries required to produce the comparable power output. These special shapes of rechargeable batteries, however, are generally higher in cost than conventional universal rechargeable battery packs, so that there is a significant cost disadvantage resulting from the necessity for using special rechargeable battery pack configurations customized to fit a particular compartment. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a battery compartment for portable equipment which is able to alternatively accommodate several standard expendable dry cell batteries or a standard rechargeable battery pack of a smaller package size without any modifications of the compartment necessary to change from one to the other.